Abstract
Community arts represent a complex but largely misunderstood part of the USA’s cultural ecology. For example, I once was presenting a paper on community arts organizations in Philadelphia when the respondent, a well regarded cultural sociologist, asked: ‘What is this? Grandmothers with crayons?’ Diane Grams has done the field a great service by writing Producing Local Color. The book provides both a set of detailed case studies of how community cultural scenes operate and a theoretical framework for connecting these scenes to broader patterns in 21st-century cities.
The main theoretical frame employed by the author is the concept of social network. In contrast to the established cultural world which is dominated by formal institutions, particularly nonprofit arts institutions and funders, local arts scenes are run by a variety of actors who often assume many identities at once. An artist may teach at a public school in the morning, work as a waiter in the afternoon, and perform at night. Indeed, it is not unusual to find a set of ‘institutions’ on the web and then discover that they all are really the same individual.
Grams’s goal is to map the variety of social networks that drive Chicago’s community art scene and to use that map to conceptualize those networks. These twin ambitions – close description of a specific set of social scenes and conceptualizing how networks in general drive the arts – create a tension that is responsible for both the more (and the less) successful parts of the book.
Grams’s conceptual framework builds on the seminal work of Howard Becker, who in Art Worlds explained that the production of works of art required complex interactions between a variety of individuals and groups. As Becker noted, the artist plays an important role in these networks, but in the final analysis is dependent on the host of other players as well.
The core of Producing Local Color is its five case studies, each of which illustrates one of the types of social network in Grams’s schema. A group of artists who focus on African and African American themes and the collectors who buy their work provides an example of an aesthetic network driven by the shared tastes and values of the artists and their patrons. From an arts research perspective, this network is interesting because it relies on shows in private houses and non-arts institutions, like schools and community centers, as venues. As a result, this activity would be largely invisible to standard research approaches, which would focus on nonprofit and commercial arts spaces.
Grams’s case study of the Rogers Park neighborhood focuses on culture’s use as a problem-solving strategy. This diverse neighborhood, far from the buzz (and real estate speculation) of the more centrally located neighborhoods, used public art and festivals as a means of fighting incipient urban decay. A coalition of activists, small-scale real estate operatives, and ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ – working alone and together – staged these events.
The other three case studies are a bit more difficult to disentangle. Grams describes a group of cutting-edge artists who took advantage of favorable rents offered by a real estate developer as an example of an autonomy network whose participants prize their freedom from market constraints. Within the time Grams conducted her study, this network was scattered as the dynamics of the Chicago real estate market took away what it had given. This same section of the Pilsen neighborhood – called Podville after the real estate developer – turns up again in Grams’s description of a gentrification network that uses artists – including the previously described autonomy network – as an opening wedge in promoting upscale developments in up-and-coming sections of the city.
In addition to telling a familiar story of artists giving way to high-income professionals – a story first told three decades ago in Sharon Zukin’s study of SoHo – Grams argues that the gentrification process whitewashes local cultures, which are replaced by an exclusive arts scene open only to those who can afford it. The author contrasts this gentrification network with an empowerment network of politicians, nonprofits, artists, and civil servants whose combined efforts succeeded in resurrecting the Bronzeville neighborhood on the city’s south side.
As the names suggest, Grams wishes to contrast gentrification and empowerment networks as negative and positive ways that the arts and place can interact. Yet, the two case studies share a number of features. Although one should not dismiss the importance of ethnic identity in driving the Bronzeville development, this was certainly supplemented by an interest in real estate values. Indeed, it is striking that the same city officials whom Grams criticizes for aiding the gentrifiers in Podville are praised for their role in the Bronzeville project.
Producing Local Color provides five detailed case studies that show the diverse ways that the arts and culture can enter place-making processes in urban neighborhoods. By pushing her material beyond simple description, Grams forces us to consider the relationships, values, and motives that influence these processes.